Items tagged with Passwords

In what is being described as the largest security breach of 2016, hackers stole over 400 million user credentials spanning two decades of customer data from Friend Finder Network, Inc., the company that owns and operates several adult-themed websites, including the online dating and hookup site AdultFriendFinder.com. This is also the second time in two years Friend Finder has been hacked. The bulk of compromised accounts came from AdultFriendFinder, the "world's largest sex and swinger community," which coughed up more than 339 million accounts. Hackers used a local file inclusion exploit to break...Read more...

More details about a previously disclosed security breach at cloud storage provider Dropbox have come to light. The hack itself is old news—it occurred back in 2012—but what's new is how many users were affected by it. Hackers made off with details belonging to north of 68 million Dropbox users, prompting a mass password reset. The folks at Motherboard got their mitts on a sample of files containing email addresses and hashed passwords of users affected by the Dropbox hack. The information is contained in four files totaling about 5GB, with details of 68,680,741 accounts. Apparently a senior Dropbox...Read more...

Data breaches happen all too frequently to companies both big and small. The latest victim is Opera Software, the Scandinavian outfit behind the Opera browser that's especially popular on mobile devices. Opera's security team said it detected signs of a attack on its sync system, and though the hack was quickly blocked, it believes the culprit(s) still made off with some stolen data. Users who take advantage of Opera's sync feature had their account details compromised in the attack, including their passwords and login names. Though Opera only stores encrypted (for synchronized passwords) or hashed...Read more...

Has it been a long time since you've changed up your passwords? Now is a good time to think about doing so. A hacker or band of hackers obtained the login credentials of 45 million Internet users spread across 1,100 websites and communities, including many major and popular online destinations such as Motorcycle.com, Mothering.com, and others. The folks at LeakedSource, a breach notification website, says VerticalScope and all of its domains were hacked in February of this year. It's not known how the attack was carried out, though LeakedSource surmises that VerticalScope stored too much...Read more...

It doesn't matter who you are or how much money you make, if you don't practice good security habits on the web you're likely to get hacked. Case in point, Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire whiz kid and co-founder of Facebook, the most popular social media site on the planet, had his Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked into over the weekend. To be fair, Zuckerberg is a bigger target than most people, but that wasn't the real reason his social media accounts outside of Facebook were compromised. It's because he was lazy with security, both with the password he chose and in reusing the same one...Read more...

Using passwords as a form of security may not be long for this world, not if Google gets its way. The Mountain View outfit's ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) division is hard at work on Project Abacus, a scheme that relies on biometric data to determine a person's identity rather than relying on traditional password input. Core to Project Abacus is a "Trust Score" that takes into account a variety of factors. One of the biggest ones is your physical location, though it's far from the only way Project Abacus calculates the likelihood that you are who you claim to be. It also analyzes things...Read more...

Internet and computer security is a very complex field that continues to challenge even the experts as new compromises and hacks are developed, discovered and exploited. However, password security, you would think is a pretty simple, straight-forward topic. Drop in a string of characters that are hard to guess and crooks and hackers looking to crack or brute-force simpler strings or common words will have a much more difficult time breaking in. For some though, the cognitive challenge of remembering a strong password is too much and as a result, they resort to passwords they can remember, rather...Read more...

Password security is one of those things you either have or you don't. If you're password is a combination of alphanumeric characters and symbols with varying punctuation, congratulations, you're in much better shape than the guy who uses "12345," the same as found on his luggage. That said, traditional password input is becoming an antiquated way of locking down accounts, which is why Google is playing around with smartphone notifications. This is something Yahoo is already doing with its Account Key service. Similar to that, Google is inviting some users to try out its new password-free option....Read more...

Some Amazon shoppers report having received an email from the online retailer to let them know that their passwords have been reset. Usually that's cause for concern, such as a security breach -- something that's become all too common as of late -- but in this case Amazon says it's simply being cautious. If that's the case, why make a password change mandatory and limit the change to only a certain number of online shoppers? According to Amazon, certain devices (we assume mobile) store passwords in such a way that they're at risk of being hijacked.The email states that Amazon "recently discovered...Read more...

Jan Souček, a security researcher from Prague, has uncovered a vulnerability in the security of the iOS Mail application that nefarious types can deploy against users of the app to gain access to their iCloud passwords. The method published by Souček illustrates how an email can be sent to the hapless victim that uses HTML code that mimics the iCloud login pop-up window upon receipt. Then, after said victim has inadvertently tapped their iCloud password into the window's Password field and clicked OK, an email is sent back to the sender with that critical information. Specifically,...Read more...

Like something out of a sci-fi movie, researchers from Binghamton University just published a study on the use of brain signals to replace traditional means of logging into secure accounts, such passwords, fingerprint reading, and even fancy retina scans. What the researchers found is that your brain responds to certain words in unique ways. The team focused on 45 volunteers who each read a list of 75 acronyms, like FBI and DVD. Researchers looked at the part of the brain that's responsible for reading and recognizing words, and surprisingly enough, there's enough of a difference to the way each...Read more...

At this point, the resetting of a mobile phone to a from-the-factory state is something we have all done, perhaps simply to get a fresh start with a device that has become sluggish and over-burdened with years of downloaded flotsam. But more likely, we do it for the purpose of selling the phone or passing it along to a friend or family member. We rely on such a reset to completely wipe the phone of any trace of our having used it, all settings and sensitive data. The results of a study performed in the UK by University of Cambridge researchers entitled Security Analysis of Android...Read more...

Slack, the fast-growing startup previously known as Tiny Speck, has rolled out an optional two-factor authentication feature in response to a recent hacker attack. The company confirmed there was unauthorized access to its database containing user profile information, and though it was quick to respond and made changes to its security infrastructure to prevent future incidents, Slack "strongly" encourages its users to take advantage of two-factor authentication. Before talking about that, let's look at what happened. According to Slack, the database that was hacked contained...Read more...

Attention all eBay users, go ahead and change your password to the auction site. Like, right now -- we'll wait. Take your time, we'll be here when you get back. Finished? Good! Don't worry, it wasn't an arbitrary exercise -- eBay later today will be sending out emails and posting notices asking you to change your password due to a security breach. Some placeholder pages were spotted online by savvy web users that seemed to suggest a notice was forthcoming. The folks at The Wall Street Journal got in touch with eBay and found out that a cyberattack compromised a database containing encrypted passwords...Read more...